Disney's 'The Black Hole' ~ Is it Set to 'Suck' or 'Blow'?

THE BLACK HOLE

(PG ~ 1979)

A research vessel finds a missing ship, commanded by a mysterious scientist, on the edge of a black hole.

Director: 

Gary Nelson

Writers: 

Jeb Rosebrook (story), Bob Barbash (story), and 3 more credits »

Stars:

Maximilian Schell, Anthony Perkins and Robert Forster

This guy Lucas is killing us- nobody wants to watch cute furry cartoon animals when they can watch cute robot ‘droids beep and fart in space. Thought they had an ointment for that. Anyway – we need to catch his ass or we’re cooked. Yeah, yeah anybody – Borgnine, Perkins – sounds good. Just put em in a ship, and blast off - NOW!! (Speculative Disney studio meetings c. 1978).

So we have The Black Hole, Disney’s big studio attempt to catch the Star Wars bandwagon before they were left in its space-dust. While the 1979 film is undeniably a blatant catch-all pastiche of previous space franchises (mainly Star Trek/ Star Wars), it’s also an efficient, entertaining yarn on its own terms - an ‘old dark house’ story of a starship crew being held hostage in space by a mad Earth scientist bent on harnessing the awesomely vague powers of the Black Hole. It also represents one of the last inventive uses of all- traditional special effects (miniatures/matte paintings/optical printing/wires) before Disney jumped headlong into the digital ether with Tron. (This one bombed.)

The skeletal (trekking) crew of the USS Palomino! is made up of gruff captain (Robert Forster), egghead 'Spock-ish' science officer (Anthony Perkins), ‘Scotty’ clone (Ernest Borgnine) brash lieutenant (Joseph Bottoms) female scientist named Kate (Yvette Mimieux), and with a hopeful nod to Star Wars, floating cute robot V.I.N.C.E.N.T. (v/o Roddy McDowall) – combining the squat google-eyed appeal of R2D2 with the fey British accent/axioms of his longtime companion C3P0. They come upon a seemingly dead vessel, the USS Cygnus, perched at the edge of the aforementioned hole. As they board the mammoth ship to investigate (hmm- this kinda reminds me of the Death Star), they discover long ago- vanished scientist Hans Reinhardt (Maximilian Schell).

Reinhardt’s wild-eyed, bearded manner disturbs some of the crew- he seems to be hiding something, and his imposing robot henchman Maximilian is not the friendliest. Turns out the Cygnus’ crew have been converted into a subservient half-robot zombie slave-crew (with opaque, hooded mirror faces) to help Reinhardt pursue his mad goals. Vincent partners up with an earlier model seen-better-days hick sanitation robot (Slim Pickens!) to uncover more details. He also takes on a Boba-Fett-like robot in an awesome laser shooting gallery in the robot rec room. (a nice touch not really seen in Lucas’ world). Meanwhile, the weaker members of the crew are weeded out through natural space attrtition. Actually, Perkins’ scientist, who plans to accompany Reinhardt through the Hole, gets an egg-beater-like chest-whisking from Maximilian. And Borgnine, panicking, attempts to take off with the Palomino himself before being blown up. It is up to the remaining motley crew to save the day.

Cue the inspirational space theme and laser battles, as the crew battles off Reinhardt’s robot minions, a rolling meteor and commandeers a probe to escape. Only problem? The probe had been previously programmed by Reinhardt to follow him straight into the Hole. Uh-oh- hope we wrote an ending! Turns out, they didn’t really. So we get some nice ‘psychedelic’ effects as they plunge through the Hole (inner/outer mind dialogue) and then a half-assed ('2001'- lite) metaphysical Heaven/Hell ‘resolution.’ See- Reinhardt was evil, so he is condemned to the fate of the Cygnus’ crew- we see his wild eyes beneath the visor of Maximilian, now merged into an unholy man/machine monster in a fiery cliff in purgatory. Meanwhile, a nice white light bathes the Palomino crew and they sail off into the (space) sunset. Aah – Disney.

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Wild Thing - I Think I Watched You

WILD THING

(PG ~ 1987)

Directed by
Max Reid

Writing credits
Larry Stamper		(story) and
John Sayles		(story)
John Sayles		(screenplay)

Starring: Rob Knepper, Kathleen Quinlan, Robert Davi, Maury Chaykin

A child witnesses drug dealers murder his parents. He escapes and grows up wild in the city's slums. Years later he emerges to help the residents of the area who are being terrorized by street gangs and drug dealers.

Wild Thing is one of those harmless, afternoon piece-of-crap pulp potboilers that seem to have gone the way of the dodo in today’s Hollywood. The ‘modern-day’ Jungle Book/ Tarzan tale tracks a child of slain hippies grown into an urban legend neo-primitive (white) ‘ghetto-warrior’ stalking the streets of ‘the Zone,’ bent on avenging his parents’ deaths. The film is also notable as an early credit for independent auteur John Sayles (Matewan/ Eight Men Out), who probably scrawled the screenplay on a cocktail napkin.

The prologue, of course scored to ‘White Rabbit,’ shows us the grizzly deaths of Wild Thing’s folks, slain in their VW bus, as they travel from the idyllic highway into the mean streets of ‘The Zone,’ and fall victims in a gun robbery by the fearsome, skull-tattooed ‘Chopper’ (dependable baddie Robert Davi) and a corrupt cop (Maury Chaykin). Their child escapes into the nearby river, presumed drowned. Next we see the adolescent Wild Thing in full Jungle Book mode, being raised by an off-the-grid bag-lady (Betty Buckley). Here Sayles entertainingly sketches the world of Wild Thing as shaped by his mother-figure- she rails against The Company (civilization) and its paper (money). On her deathbed with disease, she begs the youth not to let the ‘blue-coats’ (police) or ‘white-coats’ (hospitals) get her, and he obliges by burning her hovel down, leaving Wild Thing on his own.

 Fast forward to the ‘modern-day’ Zone, a cheap set-bound 80s NYC pastiche complete with fake graffiti and dark ‘edgy’ lofts. A group of ‘urban’ street kids tell ‘boogie-man’ tales of the Wild Thing, and his werewolf/Robin Hood exploits. We are given thankfully few glimpses of the adult Wild Thing (Rob Knepper), (late of Fox's 'Prison Break') a smallish weaselly guy with teased hair and Chuck Taylor high-tops.

Chopper is still the BMOC, holding the cops under his thumb and running the local vague drug/sex trades. There is a hilarious ‘pimp-lifestyle’ escort party scene set to a Michael McDonald-ish tune called ‘Business-Lady.’ Cue love story (yawn) – Jane, a social worker (Kathleen Quinlan) arrives by bus, to take over the local priest’s youth rehabilitation work at the safe house. She receives a rude welcome, as Chopper’s henchmen attempt to subdue and rape her. But she is saved by the mysterious Wild Thing, who kicks off the thugs and vanishes- in order to begin finger-painting her likeness on his loft wall (uh-oh.)

Jane’s work draws ever-deeper into Chopper’s world, as the good-hearted lesbian street-kid loses her lover in his clutches, and her building is burned to the ground as the whole Zone watches. The film takes its inevitable turns, as Wild Thing and Quinlan explore the ‘body-bump,’ and she gives him the means to finally get Chopper once-and-for-all. He throws him through a plate-glass window and stuff, then dives back into that damn river. O well- at least they use the Troggs version as the theme song.


Wild Thing [VHS]

If you're Chad Lowe, this must be the Highway to Hell.

Highway to Hell

(R ~ 1991)

An eloping bride is taken into Hell, and her fiancée must pursue. (IMDB)

Director: Ate de Jong

Writer: Brian Helgeland

Stars: Patrick Bergin, Kristy Swanson and Chad Lowe

Yes- Chad Lowe here – no no- Rob’s brother. His agent lets me take his call forwarding runoff when’s he’s at the gym. What’s that? A project? A supernatural thriller with Kristy Swanson as my girlfriend? Four-day shoot with full craft tables? I’m in. Such a conversation must have preceded the making of Highway to Hell, a cheap queasy fever-dream of a movie that fumbles its intended quirky/scary ratio so badly that it pulls off a rare trick – it simultaneously sucks and blows. If I told you every member of the Stiller family made cameos, and that Gilbert Gottfried played Hitler, would you watch this shit? Go ahead, but you’ll still need a hot cleansing shower immediately after.

From the opening scene, the audience must suspend disbelief, as nice guy Lowe and Swanson play a naughty couple on their way to Vegas to elope, going at it hot-and-heavy in the back seat along a side a of a dark desert highway. She reveals that she’s still a virgin (yup), saving it for their big night. But soon they wind up in a bad (in fact, evil) stretch of highway guarded by a cop from hell (C.J. Graham as Sgt. Bedlam). They seek refuge at a deserted service station run by old codger Richard Farnsworth (The Straight Story), who coaches them on the only way to beat the demon-cop - racing him through a wormhole into hell or something. (He also wants them to find his Amelia Earhardt-looking sweetheart) They even take his souped-up cherry white antique roadster for luck.

So they follow his advice, punching the car straight into ‘Hell,’ and taking the movie with it. Some of the characters they pointlessly meet there are supposed to be famously ‘bad’ (like Medea, Hitler) while others are randomly stupid and evil. The aforementioned Stiller cameos fly by in a diner scene - Ben Stiller fries an egg on the sidewalk (cause it’s Hell). The couple has some car trouble, so they take it to a mechanic who later turns out to be Satan (bland Patrick Bergin, a poor man’s Kevin Kline) So Swanson gets kidnapped (Satan luvs virgins) and replaced with monster saggy-breasted succubus. 

Lowe must get her back, traveling across the River Styx (guarded by three-headed dog Cerberus). Then the Devil challenges them to one last race back to their dimension. They win somehow.

As I said, in trying to mix quirky Repo Man-esque moments into its Ghoulies-esque scare-story, the movie just comes across a wtf mashup you can’t wash off quicky enough. But if you’re a Stiller completist, you had this coming.

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Your Daughter is One.

TIMES SQUARE

(R ~ 1980)

Directed by Allan Moyle
Writing credits: Jacob Brackman writer, story: Allan Moyle & Leanne Unger

Stars:

 Tim Curry, Trini Alvarado and Robin Johnson 

Two ill-matched teenage girls form a punk band and soon have New York by its ears. (IMDB)

Sleez Sisters Unite! Director Allan Moyle’s (Pump Up The Volume) 1980 theatrical flop/cult fave is a lost classic of New York punk romance- an urban Tom and Huck adventure between two teen female runaways seeking love and meaning in the gnarled heart of the city. Filmed on location amid the ruined neon marquees and docks of seedy pre-Giuliani Manhattan, it also foreshadows the struggle that would transform the neighborhood in the next decades to a Disney-fied grotesque mall, its grimy soul melted away with the sleaze. Along with the later Stigwood-produced rock fable Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains (1982), this film provided ground zero exploitation/inspiration for a new bunch of kids lost in a plastic world.

For Johnny LaGuardia (reliable Tim Curry of Clue, Rocky Horror Picture Show etc.), a ‘celebrity’ overnite DJ at rock station WJAD, Times Square serves as his muse, as he spins mellifluous odes to the filthy streets of Gotham as an Oz to be savored. Trini Alvarado is Pamela Pearl, his biggest fan and privileged daughter of the up-and-comer ‘liberal’ mayoral candidate, who rails against the dangers of letting the streets be - fabricating fables about how he can’t take her to a movie safely on 42^nd St. 


Pamela protests the lies so Dad takes his emotional ‘troubled’ daughter to a hospital psych clinic for study, where she meets her rocker counterpart, Nicky Marotta, (Joan Jett-like Robin Johnson), a streetwise juvie lifer who plays The Ramones’ “I Wanna be Sedated” on her duct-taped boombox in bed. After a few days, Nickie has left her mark on Pamela, inspiring her to write journal poetry and stuff. She persuades Pamela to stay off the meds cause they ‘take your fight away,’ and the two bust loose into the city.

Soon they are shacked up in a waterfront pier warehouse, coining the name The Sleez Sisters. Nicky finds Pamela a dancer job in the Cleopatra Club (“You don’t take yer clothes off – I like that.”) and begins writing her own poetry – rock songs like ‘I’m a Damn Dog Now." The Sisters exploit and provoke themselves to punk legend status through guerilla ‘street art’ like dropping TVs off tenement roofs and putting bandit masks on Pamela’s bus-side ‘missing’ posters. They even gleefully provoke their paranoid 'grownup' pursuers live on the air (to LaGuardia’s mutual benefit) – “Spic, Nigger, Faggot, Bum – Your Daughter is One!” 

Pamela’s father eventually closes in to her whereabouts, locating her smoking onstage at the Cleo as the colored girls sing ‘Walk on The Wild Side.” She’s all grown up, daddy. Nicky (did we mention she’s troubled?) begins to realize that Pamela will return to her path on her terms, where she has nowhere to go but further out. 

She lets LaGuardia have an exclusive ‘scoop’ They will stage an impromptu farewell show atop a marquee that night - their own ‘Let It Be’ moment, an underground spectacular hyped to those ‘in the know.’ We see a montage of chaotic female fans (the Sleez Army) roaming the streets, street vendors selling plastic trash bags as ‘Sleez Bags’ to the tourists. After performing a rousing ‘Damn Dog’ reprise, the cops come to shut them down, and Nicky says her goodbye, falling into the adoring arms of screaming girls as Pamela rejoins ‘civilization.’

Times Square is more than another ‘cult classic’ with an amazing double-LP soundtrack (Roxy Music, Gary Numan, Suzie Quatro etc.) It is a wide-eyed ode to the power of the city, youth, transformation and rock n’ roll - and it all seems like a fairytale now, which is alright by me. Whatever happened to the Teenage Dream?

It's a shitstorm out there.

Cop 

(R ~ 1988)

Director: James B. Harris
Writers: James Ellroy (novel), James B. Harris (screenplay)
Starring: James Woods, Lesley Ann Warren, Charles Durning, Randi Brooks, Charles Haid etc.


Lloyd Hopkins, a hard-boiled American police detective is on the trail of a mass murderer who is victimizing women in Los Angeles. The pursuit leads him through a world that has become his own natural habitat - a nasty world of crime, drugs, prostitution and male hustlers where "innocence kills" and continued exposure corrupts. Paradoxically, it's also a world of love, secret admirers, romantic feminist poets and modern chivalry (IMDB).

Uh, yeah. The amount you will enjoy this movie is directly proportional to your appreciation of a James Woods performance in full-on hambone gear. The film is ‘loosely’ based on famed LA crime novelist James Ellroy’s ‘Blood on the Moon.’ Woods plays Lloyd Hopkins, a hard-boiled (see above), ‘unorthodox’ LA cop who has grown sick and tired of scumbags, hot on a the trail of a kinky serial lady-killer. Sounds great, right? 

It starts out promisingly enough, as Hopkins is called to one more Hollywood crime scene, where he finds a young woman strung upside-down and gutted brutally, with ominous poetic lines scrawled in the victim’s blood on the wall. Looking through the apartment, he sees a newspaper with a male hustler’s sex ad circled, and a book removed from the shelf - a feminist manifesto called ‘Rage in the Womb.’ (uh-oh) Hopkins seems to have trouble leaving the job at the office- his ‘bedtime stories’ for his daughter revolve around ‘how I nailed that perp.’ Before going to sleep, she asks “Tell me again how you caught the scumbag, Daddy?” But mom isn’t having it, and confronts him for tarnishing their child’s innocence. Woods launches into a possessed tirade about how every corpse was once a little girl and that “innocence kills!”  

Needless to say, his wife and kid take off, so he calls his old partner (dependable Charles Durning) for a good old-fashioned night-time bust, where he kills a Mexican, and screws his hooker date. So the movie seems to be rumbling right along - the sleep-deprived cop digs manically through the old files, convinced that a serial killer is targeting innocent white liberal college-age girls looking for kinky sex. (He turns over old victim photos, racial profiling  while muttering to himself – black, black, whatever – innocent!) Meanwhile, we get Woods in his pock-marked ‘Bad Lieutenant’ mode, railing against the captain and screwing female suspects willy-nilly, including the luscious Randi Brooks (Tightrope), as a kinky past-her-prime actor/swinger party madam).

Then he follows a lead to a feminist bookstore, develops a ‘love interest’ in its 'suspicious' proprietor (annoying turtle-necked Warren), and the movie literally turns to shit. The stereotypical chain-smoking man-hater quickly melts and opens up to Hopkins,  recounting how everything changed for her on the traumatic night she was raped in high school bathroom, while other girls left the scene. They go to dinner, he listens to the endless droning story, growing visibly impatient – Best line – “Well I heard about the rape- might as well get the whole enchilada.” Turns out an anonymous secret admirer has been sending her pressed flowers over the 15 years, with encouraging notes about her ordeal. Woods (detective work) finds that these notes have all been sent on the exact dates of the girls’ murders! 

After eliminating (and killing) a creepy beat cop and former jock (Hill Street Blues’ Haid) as the murderer (he was just the rapist, see), Woods pinpoints the murderer as someone who identified with Warren and the feminist plight – wait- in her old high-school yearbook, there it is – a moody loner named Franco, nicknamed - “poet laureate.” OK now just to find him- I know, how about the old high school. He tracks down the perp to the high school gym, where after some confusing acrobatics, he blows him away with a sawed-off. (“I just got suspended – and I don’t give a fuck!”) 

I made this movie sound better than it was, as it goes seriously off the rails - from gritty Spillanity to Sylvia Plathitude. Woods seems to sense it too, so he makes the most of the crap and milks it to the max.  If you only read this and never see it – you’re welcome (in advance).

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Flash - I love you, but we've got 30 seconds to save the Universe!

Flash Gordon

(PG ~ 1980)

Directed by Mike Hodges

Produced by Dino De Laurentiis

Starring: Sam J. Jones, Melody Anderson, Max Von Sydow etc.

Writers: Lorenzo Semple Jr. (screenplay), Michael Allin (adaptation)

Based on characters created by Alex Raymond

In the long and sordid history of comic film adaptations, this Dino De Laurentiis-produced oddity based on the 1930s action comic serial strips, doesn’t often rise to the top of the pack. But taken on its own, it is a weird achievement. In full disclosure, this was the first film I was allowed to see in the theater without my parents. Therefore the sci-fi S&M atmosphere must have seemed just that much dirtier. (I didn't know about this yet.) And the marriage of awesomely grandiose Queen soundtrack (later sampled by Public Enemy) with ridiculous visuals like Hawkman gladiators attacking in flight just doesn’t get old. In its wooden acting (aside from Von Sydow’s seminal Ming the Merciless) and fetishistic camp sets/costumes, the movie’s true cousin is the infamous Barbarella. (also Dino’s baby)

Though instead of Fonda cheesecake, here we must watch Sam Jones, blank block of beefcake (dubbed badly) whose only other notable role was in the delightful My Chauffeur. Flash is here a star quarterback for the New York Jets, who along with Dale (Melody Anderson) is marooned in a rocket with mad Jew scientist Hans Zarkov (Topol from Fiddler on the Roof!). They are bound for the planet Mongo, controlled by the evil Emperor Ming himself. Ming plans to scrape their brains clean through an evil found-footage machine (see A Clockwork Orange), and use Zarkov’s vague technology to destroy the Earth and enslave the universe- he’s bored.

Right away, Flash’s football skills come in handy, as he plays keepaway and smear the queer with Ming’s valuable booty. Dale is taken captive into the royal harem, and Flash must resist the ample temptations of Ming’s daughter Princess Aura (sexy Ornella Muti), who hopes to seduce him telepathically to the dark side. She wears amazing skin-tight red satin pantsuits, and straddles him as he tries to operate a stick-shift. (Dale even hears his incriminating telepathic VO: “Oh my god – this girl is really turning me on.”)

Flash’s strategy? Recruit the leaders of the planets currently under Ming’s thumb to rebel and overthrow the tyrant. He finds mustachioed Prince Barin, (Timothy ‘Bond’ Dalton) a simpering Errol Flynn-lite suitor of Aura, on his planet Arboria, and must stick his arm in a bunch of holes to overcome the scary random stump monster (which really terrified me as a kid) in order to gain his loyalty. They also draft Prince Vultan (bearded Brian Blessed) and his Hawkmen, half-man/falcon creatures sort of like the Hell’s Angels (they still ride righteous flying motorcycles even though they can fly.) Together the rebel troops attack, and Flash must defeat Ming’s robot commander Klytus in a duel over metal spikes (oozing eyeballs-check). 

Flash leads the rebels to victory over the fiendish Ming, turning the telepathy machine against him (that’s gotta hurt). The football hero saved us all! (Every single one of us.) As I said, taken on its own terms, this version of the 1930s comic serial works perfectly. Like the old film serials, it creates an absurd, campy universe that believes its own BS, not a clueless, sterile ‘futuristic’ CGI-enhanced empty vessel like we’re all stuck in.

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